What does it take for hatred to stop? What about humanity makes us so judgmental and so inclined towards violence?
I don’t know, and it’s a cruel downside of curiosity that I likely never will understand. Even still, This Week in History, I want to share with you the history of an innocent man’s demise, which should have taught humanity its lesson about violence.
There’s really no need for weather forecasts in Britain, as it’s always raining. But Blair Peach couldn’t get used to the rain because he wasn’t British.
Born in New Zealand in 1946, Peach experimented his way through his early life like any other. He tried to serve as a firefighter but decided not to pursue that, then he was denied military service due to his “unsuitable character.” Finding a place for Peach proved to be difficult.
In 1979, Peach found himself teaching at a special needs school in London’s East End. There, he was sailing downwind against a new wave of dystopian ethno-nationalism, spearheaded by the — definitively not evil-sounding — National Front.
While it wasn’t quite Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the National Front was stirring up discontent and hatred over the East End’s large Asian population and convincing many that they had no home in Britain. Protests soon sprang up, and counter-protests followed.
Peach was an ordinary man but an extraordinary advocate. He noticed a grave injustice facing the Black and Asian communities in London. The National Front was getting increasingly fanatical, to the point of violence in the streets. This wasn’t new: 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaddar’s death in 1976 proves it.
It wasn’t just the rain that kept people’s heads down as they walked in London anymore. It was the weight of hatred left unchecked.
As Londoners’ worries increased, so did the gall of the National Front. The time was ripe for a rally, right where Chaddar was stabbed to death.
To keep the hatred in check, 3,000 police officers were deployed to ensure the Front’s day was perfect, and it was. One by one, over 340 counter-protestors were arrested off the streets. The National Front stood triumphant as boots trampled their vulnerable enemy. There was nothing paramedics could do. They weren’t allowed near the wounded prisoners.
Amidst it all stood Peach. As a member of the Anti-Nazi League, he was vaguely connected to the People Unite movement, the group that was attempting to stop the National Front. But after this day, the group’s leader Clarence Baker was beaten into a coma that lasted months. Their headquarters were ransacked.
Again, amidst it all stood Peach. What could he do but walk home, knowing that he hadn’t participated in this effort for nothing. Surely, there was something larger about it all.
Peach was one of the few Londoners who looked up.
In his sunken eyes, all he could see were six figures kitted out in dark gear. Gripping crowbars, possibly a whip, you wouldn’t be able to tell these men apart from medieval torturers on their lunch break.
All it took was one blow to the head.
This week in history, on April 23, 1979, Peach was killed. The Special Patrol Group police forces began investigating his death.
“This was a particularly violent demonstration and the violence was mainly from the Asian youths, who appeared quite often to lose complete control of their emotions,” one disclosed Metropolitan Police report states.
This week in history, and left unsolved all the way up until today, Commander Cass begins an investigation into Peach’s death. Was he killed by another protester to simply make a martyr? Or were police officers responsible for hauling his body down an alleyway?
“…it raises the question of conspiring or attempting to pervert justice if [the police] decided to tell lies, but there is no such proof,” the 1979 police report states.
Fourteen witnesses claimed that Peach was beaten by the police that day. Would they all “decide” to tell lies?
I leave making sense of the rest of This Week in History in your hands. On April 27, 2010, the Metropolitan Police Service released for the first time in 31 years a plethora of secret documents to the public.
“The whole police investigation into what happened on 23 April 1979 was clearly designed as an exercise in managing the fallout from the events of that iconic day in Southall, to exonerate police violence in the face of legitimate public protest,” said Deborah Coles, the co-director of INQUEST, a charity which investigates state-related deaths. “The echoes of that exercise sound across the decades to the events of the G20 protest and the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009.”
Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor, was killed by police in 2009. No police officer has been charged for Peach’s death. They have also deemed the case unworthy of future investigation.
We will never find an answer as to why humanity is so inclined towards violence and hate, but we have an answer as to why many choose to strive against it. Those people who looked up when others could not and those who bore the blows in others’ stead will be the ones who guide humanity towards a better future.
They may never be remembered properly, and they may never have a monument in their stead, but as Cato the Elder once said, “I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.”
Amidst it all was Blair Peach.